You know how I keep saying tension needs to exist for a show to be good, and how slice of life just doesn’t have much of it to make me care? Many of you argue that slice of life has tension, even when it doesn’t involve the fate of the universe. Some cute girls trying to win in a school competition can be as exciting as giant robots protecting earth from aliens.

Then I keep saying how the stakes need to be high so the conflict can feel significant and rewarding, only to see most of you arguing how the hundreds of mecha series of the past are as easy to forget as the hundreds of moe shows we are getting today. High stakes do not make a difference if a show is equally forgettable with or without them. It’s all a matter of perspective.       

And that perspective is what I want to clarify when it comes to how the mentality of the average viewer changed since I was a kid. Shows that take it easy are better than shows that take themselves too seriously, when the core audience watches them for relaxation. That is the case with a big portion of anime nowadays, compared to when I was a kid. My generation was watching them for excitement; this generation is watching them for some relief from a world that went crazy. 

I mean, my generation also had the whole dementia about a possible nuclear holocaust, or pollution destroying the world, but things were fairly black and white. We knew whom to cheer for and whom to boo when watching fiction. This is not the case anymore; the world became sensitive and easy to trigger. People getting murdered for making a sketch of Mohammed, feminists demanding the impossible when it comes to respect, the elections of America being about picking the least horrible candidate instead of the most capable.

This has crawled into fiction. You can’t read a recent comic book without feeling it is meant to depress you instead of inspire you. I’m all in favor of grey characters and ambiguous morality, but not when it’s done to this degree. The average person will not touch recent comic books exactly because they are going to make him feel worse instead of better. I mean, most retro anime were full mass destruction and the death of millions, but they were still fun. Mostly because they were simpler and more direct on what they were about. 

There are exceptions of course; not everything is bleak and depressing nowadays. Many shows are still fun, but in a completely different way. The crafty and cerebral way is not that appreciated today, despite being far superior to childish cartoons of the 80s. The reason being the change in social demands. When I was growing up, if you knew two languages and had finished high school, you had a secure job with a big salary. It didn’t require that much studying and most of us were playing videogames or watching action series for most of the day. 

Not anymore; the demands have multiplied several times since then and people of today are forced to study and work way harder than they used to. Not in the physical sense, since machines and computers have made most activities easier, but in the effort required to get things done and be the one chosen amongst millions of others. This means a lot less free time, and a lot more anxiety and frustration. 

So what are these kind of people going to choose when they want to relax? An unfunny comic book about miserable superheroes, cerebral theme exploration, or cute girls doing cute things? Why pick the one that will probably trigger someone and stress their minds even further than reality already does?

And that is the main reason of why younger folks don’t understand when I complain about modern anime being worse to retro. They are not exciting anymore, they either try to make your mind go blank, or make you overthink the plot through mystery boxes which turn out to be bullshit once the truth comes out. It’s a case of generational gap where I seek exciting action after watering tomatoes all day, whereas they seek to jerk off to some moeblob after 10 hours of studying. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn-hBiiB_WA